Trigger warning: Self harm and suicide
Hi everybody. This is my very first post. Hope I am not breaking any rules.
The following is a very long and challenging read. Before I start please know that this was a few years ago and I am absolutely fine now and have much better support than I had back then. This is just the worst work experience I have ever had and I thought some people might be interested in what happened, as well as learn from my experiences so should they find themselves in my position they have a little more perspective.
Ten years ago I lost my brother to suicide. It was completely out of the blue. He had never spoken to anybody about any mental health issues and I don’t know how long he’d been battling with depression. That night the insidious voice in his head said the right combination of words that led to my brother choosing to do the only thing he could do to silence it. I could write an entire book on what happened in the days and weeks that followed, and the ripples that are still being felt today as his children navigate a world without him, but I’ll try and focus on the anti-work aspect of it.
I was still living at home with parents when the police arrived late one night and delivered the news. I tried to comfort my mother, but she pushed me away. I went outside and took a minute for myself to gather my thoughts and to have a cry. A minute later my mum came outside too and I just stopped crying because I wanted to help her. It’s weird. I was fully unleashing and then literally nothing. A switch went in my head, like it knew it’s not ok for me to be upset right now, I have to make sure our mother is taken care of as well as his four young children. So that was it. I was completely numb throughout the first year or so. Others sobbed at his funeral and at Christmas and his birthday and his children’s birthdays, but I had nothing. If you have been in this position you understand the self-loathing that comes at these times because you know you should be upset too but you’re not. You are unable to shed a single tear for someone you love. Am I actually just a cold a callous arsehole? Do people know this about me and yet I don’t know it about myself? Maybe that is why he didn’t feel like he could approach me when he needed help?
I had zero people to talk to. Sure, they would say the right things, but my parents weren’t in any position to hear me unload because my grief was a fraction of theirs (though no less valid, I know) and I knew I had to pretend to be ok because the slightest wobble would tip my mother over the edge and she would panic I was about to do the same thing. My sister is wonderful but she had very young kids to look after and was obviously grieving herself. My friends had no idea how to handle the situation so they just kind of ignored me. Yes, I know now I had awful friends and they have all gone and been replaced by much better people.
I was working in a call centre. It was extremely stressful with angry customers and even angrier managers yelling at you for not somehow managing to fix complex issues within the 4 minute average handling time they plucked out of thin air one day. They knew about my brother because they gave me 9 days off as special leave when it happened and I did see a doctor and got 4 weeks extra, but no one from work ever actually checked on me. Literally no managers asked how I was so I understood that to mean they didn’t care. A whole ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ situation when they just assumed I was fine because I was back at work. I kind of HAD to be fine, because I got a written warning for those four weeks. Apparently 8 days in a year is a trigger point and there’s no leeway.
Yes. I got a written warning for daring to have 4 weeks off after my brother died.
It’s about a year later and the anniversary of his death is messing with my head. I am having an awful morning at work and a customer calls, a very sweet guy, and he just mentions he’s going to be seeing his brother for his birthday that weekend and I don’t know what happened but everything I had suppressed for the last year just fell out. I was completely gone. I managed to pull myself together and told my immediate manager (Let’s call her Kate) that I needed to take a minute. She saw I was upset and just told me to take as long as I need. I came back a little while later and I just can’t face doing another 6 hours of this job. I don’t have the strength. I tell my manager this and she says ok, just do a bit of admin work and that I don’t have to talk to the customers.
About an hour later Kate comes to me and says “I’ve been told to tell you that you have to go on the phone or go home sick”.
I had already received a written warning for those four weeks so that was the last thing I wanted to do, and I also absolutely did not want to go on the phone. So I told them if they are TELLING me to go off sick I am going to need that in writing, just to protect myself from the inevitable written warning I was going to face.
Kate trundles off and comes back 3 minutes later with a face that tells me she’s been shouted at, and says “We can’t put it in writing but I will tell you in front of a witness”.
So I turn to my friend who sits at the desk next to me and ask if she will be my witness. She says yes. Kate then hits me with “you can’t take anybody offline (from the calls) to be your witness”. So I look at her a bit dumbfounded. We’re a call centre. Everyone is on the phone. Who is going to witness if I am not allowed to take anybody away from their job for a few minutes?
Kate goes off again and comes back down a minute later with the senior manager, we’ll call her Jean, and Jean says “I am going to be the witness”. I point out she is not going to be the witness, it’s her instructions that Kate has been passing on to me, so all she’s doing is witnessing Kate tell me what she’s told her to tell me.
She instructs me to go into the nearby office and the rest takes place with just me, Jean and Kate. This is where I was incredibly stupid and if you find yourself in a similar situation do NOT go anywhere with managers without independent witnesses coming with you too.
The first thing I do here is ask for a union representative. I can’t take a colleague off the phone so I want a union rep.
“what do you think I am telling you that I shouldn’t be telling you, which means you need a union rep?” asks Jean.
“what are you telling me that you won’t put in writing or have witnesses for?” I ask.
She doesn’t like that. I am flat out told that I am not allowed union representation because it’s not an official meeting. I request one several times but I didn’t have the strength right then to fight for myself. The next forty minutes are kind of a blur. I do remember the phrase “get on the phone or go home sick” being used as a lot. I remember sobbing like I have never sobbed in my life. Two women I had previously thought were friends bullying and berating me, telling me to get to work, to get over it, everyone loses people, and they were exchanging eye rolls and tuts and openly laughing. I remember Jean asking what the scarring was along my arms and me, being very embarrassed, telling her to not worry about them (as I didn’t want to discuss why I had been doing them. I wasn’t trying to end my life, I just honestly needed to contain my rage and frustrations and had no healthy outlet. Physical pain seemed to calm me. This is not an endorsement, obviously. DO NOT DO THIS).
Her reply?
“I didn’t say I was worried I asked what they were”. Ok, cool. You have an employee crying in front of you with scarring down his arms that is clearly done over a prolonged period of time and you tell them you aren’t worried. That certainly put me at ease and made me feel like I could open up.
Anyway after a while I am just done and I need to escape. So I say fine, I will go off sick. They weren’t expecting that answer and they made no secret of the fact that I had just really fucked up and there would be consequences.
This was on a Friday lunch time. I called in sick on the Monday and went back on the Tuesday. Fun part of my job is that when you are off sick you must have a ‘back to work’ meeting with your manager. So Kate comes and we have this meeting where she asks why I was off sick, am I better now, can I do my job etc and I tell her I would have been ok to work last Friday if they had found another role for me to do without customer contact for a few hours (of which there are plenty and it was the ‘done thing’ when staff were ill in order to not have them go off fully sick.) They just decided to not extend it to me that day for reasons I will never know.
Kate goes off and types it all up in the form of a first person statement as if written by me and brings it to me to sign. I read it and there’s absolutely nothing about this meeting or what I had said about being told to go off sick. So I wrote on the statement in pen the actual things that I wanted written on there and I signed it and handed it back. Kate said it looked unprofessional and she will type it up and bring it back to me, which she did a few minutes later.
I sign it and she takes it off to Jean to sign. She comes back a minute later on the verge of tears and says “we can’t have this statement because none of this happened”.
I said what do you mean none of this happened? You were in the room. You heard everything that was said. This absolutely happened.
“No, none of this happened it can’t be on the statement”.
I asked her why, if none of this happened, had she written it up? She had nothing to say. I told her it was the only statement I was going to sign. She went off again to Jean. I don’t know what was said but I never heard a thing about that statement or that meeting ever again. I have checked my personnel file in the years since and that statement is in there, unsigned by either of them, but there is no other statement that they have written giving a different version of events.
I know at this point that I am so far beyond ok that I desperately need help. I gather what tiny amount of strength I can muster and I go and see a GP and they are absolutely wonderful. They are the first person in a year that genuinely wanted to help me and wasn’t just paying lip service. She insisted on seeing me every week and we talked about medication and therapy, which she moved heaven and earth to get me into at very short notice. Honestly, I think she may have saved my life. Perhaps not literally because at that point I wasn’t thinking about doing anything like my brother did but I was definitely on a slippery slope. Please everyone, if you are struggling then therapy is the best thing in the world. We all need some help sometimes and there’s no shame in it. Absolutely the smartest thing I have ever done.
But back to the ‘my bosses are arseholes’ story. My new doctor signs me off work. At this point I don’t care about the written warnings and am in a kind of ‘fuck you’ mindset with them. So I call the big BIG boss and say hey, I have a sick note, I’ll be off for two weeks.
“And are you taking your doctors advice?”.
Weird question, right? “Are you going to take your doctor’s advice and improve your health or are you going to ignore it and work yourself into oblivion with a management team that have literally just told you they don’t care if you die?”.
So I said yeah, I will take my doctors advice. She said I really need to have a break.
“SHE? So you didn’t see a doctor then, you saw a nurse?” she says like it’s a GOTCHA.
At this point the whole thing has become a weird Terry Gilliam/Mike Leigh workplace horror film and all I can do is stutter a reply saying no. I definitely saw a doctor. I hope you are starting to see the really messed up culture and belief system that existed at the top that made its way down the ranks.
So I go off sick for 6 or so weeks in the end. I have my therapy. I decompress and I relax and I start to feel a little like myself again so I go back to work. I know people want an ending where I got the union and we tore them a new one and I walked away with millions as Jean and Kate were fired and are now destitute but no. I just didn’t have the strength for any of that. As I have hopefully made clear, the management system in that place would not have allowed me to ‘win’. I simply ate the written warning and kept my nose clean until it could no longer be used against me.
I don’t know if it was related but within a few months I was gone from Kate’s team and Jean’s command and I found myself with managers that had a bit of empathy and I thrived in my job roles and put in some good work. I have since met an incredible woman who made me a better person. I got a promotion into a department I wanted to work in and I am doing better than I have ever done.
As an aside, whenever I do see Jean around the building (which is very rare, mostly if we happen to get into the lift when the other is already in it) I give my biggest smile and warmest greeting. She has the good grace to look utterly ashamed of herself and barely grunts a reply.
I like to think that my happiness ultimately makes me the ‘winner’.
The lessons I hope you learn from this is that people are only ever going to treat you as well as you insist that you are treated. I did not fight for myself and I’ve regretted failing that younger man every day since. It does pain me to think that my inaction allowed Jean and the whole management structure to go unchallenged and that people would have suffered since but it’s not something I feel I can raise 8 years later. The union were told my story at the time and mental health is something that is being taken more and more seriously, though I think that is more of a general national awareness and acknowledgement rather than my case specifically. I do speak up for others now and try to be someone both I and my brother can respect.
And again, if you are struggling then please reach out to your GP. I know the NHS gets a lot of bad press but there is help out there. I genuinely believe the individuals working within the NHS are working as hard as they can and will do everything within their power to help you. It’s not perfect by any means but they are very special people and so please give them a chance to help you. You are not alone.
Do not believe that bastard whispering lies into your ear.